The skill that never goes obsolete
46 comments
·February 25, 2025credit_guy
sjsdaiuasgdia
I think you may be leaning too far in the other direction.
I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. Every job I've had across 3 decades, regardless of my actual title or formal responsibilities, I'm the firefighter. People call me when they can't figure something out. People call me when something big breaks and needs to be fixed urgently. Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering and not making any progress because they can't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag.
I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. When I nearly left a prior employer because much of the work wasn't aligned with what I wanted to do, management created a new role with better aligned work and higher pay to convince me to stay. In my current role, I'm very happy with my salary, working environment, management, and team.
I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills. I wouldn't need to help out nearly as many people because they could handle their own crises.
EvanAnderson
> I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. ... People call me when they can't figure something out. ... Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering ...
This describes a sizable portion of my career. It's lucrative, it's gratifying, and it's fun. It's as close as I'm going to get to being a "kick-ass mercenary".
Seeing new environments, new applications, and new problems never gets old. The stories that come from the work are priceless, too.
> I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills.
When I conduct interviews this is the main skill I screen for. I think it can be taught, but somebody who already has it and is missing some particular technical experience is vastly more valuable.
dblohm7
> I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs.
If only your experience was universal in that regard! I once had that role in an early-career job -- but I was looked down upon by peers and management because I was doing mostly maintenance work. The "good" developers, in their minds, were the ones shipping the most new features -- the irony being that those features would then blow up out in the field, at which time they landed on my desk to turn them into production-worthy code.
rokhayakebe
In fact you could easily be the guy they keep on a monthly retainer just for peace of mind.
lurk2
The word retainer has an appealing mercenary quality to it. The dream is that your knowledge of an esoteric system set up in the 1980s gets you warehoused in a data closet at a mid-sized organization, where you can spend the rest of your days browsing Hacker News and watching pirated films.
xerox13ster
This mentality through most of my career has left me trapped as technical support, and it's damn near impossible to climb out of the pit I've dug for myself. What you say about being seen as a car mechanic is true.
foo_barrio
This played out at my last place. My boss would assign my co-worker to build the world's crappiest car in the least amount of time and when it broke down I would be the only one that seemed to be able to fix it (while my co-worker was busy building some other crappy car). I would have built a much better car in the first place! However I would have taken more time and the goal was to build and release as fast a possible. My boss was okay with the risk of said crappy car, my co-worker got promoted and I slowly burned out.
It's a tough balancing to make sure you sell yourself correctly and fight to work on things you want to!
rokhayakebe
Until you start your own company, even if it is just you.
fjjjrjj
I feel this way about documentation. I do it, a lot. I get compliments and positive feedback on it. It helps me remember things I would otherwise forget. I hope that others would be inspired by my example but it hasn't happened. I could be selfish and horde my own documentation and let others sink or swim. But that hurts me too as I'd have to pick up their slack.
jemmyw
> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot
I dunno, the mechanic I go to is reliable and so busy it's hard to get a slot these days, and he seems to be doing very well for himself. So many mechanics are unreliable
imglorp
If you are debugging your work too much, maybe it's you.
Obligatory Kernighan’s law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
pinkmuffinere
And it isn’t just your _appearance_ or _pay_ you should be worrying about. If you fix a nitpicky bug that affected 5% of the users — congrats that’s a pretty big bug! But could you have built a new feature that would roll out to 50% of users in that same time? In many situations, building the new feature will have a bigger impact on the world than the bug fix. Obviously will depend on the exact circumstance. But you should consider the opportunity cost.
bee_rider
Hmm. Well, of course it isn’t on any one person to fix a systemic issue. But, I really would not want to use a system where the institutional decision was made to focus on new features instead of fixing bugs that hit 5% of users.
Cpoll
> But could you have built a new feature that would roll out to 50% of users in that same time?
No.
pinkmuffinere
If the impact of debugging is expected to be larger than building something new, then debug. Else, build something new.
Curiositry
This is a fascinating take. I have been thinking about your comment for two days.
I think you're right in some cases (when working in a field one has mastered, for example), and I think I could probably go in the direction of getting it right the first time.
But the way I see it, any time I'm doing something new or innovative, I'm doing something I don't know how to do, which takes trial and error; and troubleshooting is basically figuring things out by trial and error, in systematic way.
Though a lot of time it is used for fixing bugs, I think troubleshooting as a skill and mindset is equally useful for creating new things, where you are solving for something.
ge96
time dilation
zem
> Soon you'll be seen by others as a car mechanic. Maybe a reliable car mechanic. But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot.
this argues for a messed up reward system for the company, not the engineer. all sufficiently large systems have bugs and performance issues, and adding a measure of reliability, stability, and speed is just as important as adding features.
dylan604
> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot.
If you're a wizbang mechanic working for an import car repair, you can get paid a lot more in hourly labor fees than some of us make.
wpm
Hugged to death for me right now, here's an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250228192142/https://www.autod...
Curiositry
Thanks for posting an archive link. My site has survived previous HN traffic spikes on Fly.io's free tier, but 256mb of RAM wasn't quite adequate this time :)
msie
They should troubleshoot the long loading times for the site.
nioj
The site appears to be hugged to death for me.
Curiositry
Yes, sorry. I have scaled up my hosting and it's back :)
throwaway81523
The skill is "troubleshooting". Not to be confused with its close cousin, "troublemaking".
> Realizing that I spend more time troubleshooting than I do building or doing ...
That's not good. The problem with troubleshooting is that it messes up with your reward system. After you fix a hard-to-debug problem, you feel a sense of accomplishment. Which would be ok, but the problem is that this sense of accomplishment is often time higher than it should be. You go home at the end of the day thinking "well, today I didn't build anything, but it's fine, because I fixed that bug". You are becoming complacent.
If you end up saying to yourself, like the author of this blog here, that you troubleshoot more than you build or you do, then you have a problem. Soon you'll be seen by others as a car mechanic. Maybe a reliable car mechanic. But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot.
This might be a controversial take but here it is: being proud of your troubleshooting skills sits somewhere between being proud of your typing speed and being proud of your word document formatting skills. These things never go obsolete, but don't fool yourself into thinking they are gold currency on the job market.